Her face showed no fear and no regret as she stepped off the platform to her death, her courage and her spirit expressed in one magnificent frozen moment.
I want to say that as she stepped into open space, I weighed her life against all others, against the world itself. I want to say that I set her aside for the greater good and that I watched the cord slice through her flesh until it met bone, jerking her to a stop in mid-air, savior of us all.
But the truth is that I didn’t. It never even occurred to me. I ran for her, arms outstretched in front of me, while her hair floated in place around her face as she began to fall. The world could go straight to hell for all that it crossed my mind. But I wasn’t going to make it. Not even close. Her head dropped below the level of the walkway even as I threw myself down onto the catwalk, my hands grasping empty air.
But Piotr wasn’t going to be beaten like that. That same wispy, foggy tendril that protected him and snatched bullets out of the air snapped out and arrested her fall just before the cord pulled taut.
He laughed and clapped his hands together in delight. “It appears that Abe doesn’t share your views on self-sacrifice, but he certainly shares mine on sacrificing the rest of the world.” Anne floated gracefully up over the catwalk, and then gently down again. “Don’t worry, there will be plenty of sacrifice to go around soon enough, and I promise that I won’t save you when it’s time.”
Tears were running down Anne’s face as she balled her fists up and screamed, “What do you want from me? You won’t let me die, but you say that you’re going to kill me. You won’t say what this is all about except for some bullshit about justice and revenge and whatever the fuck else. What. Do. You. Want?”
Her head rocked back and blood flew from her mouth as Piotr’s hand smashed across her face. His voice, when he spoke, was dinner-party calm and reasonable. “I want you to remain alive until it’s time for you not to be alive, and to be quiet until then. Is that so much to ask?”
Her knees went slack and her eyes glazed over, but instead of hitting the ground she rose up a few inches instead, floating in place. Piotr turned around without another word and began walking, towing her behind him on a misty tether.
I stormed past her and slammed my fist with all my strength into the back of his eighty-year-old neck in a killing blow. My fist stopped, halted by my own arm, inches before it touched him. I tried again. And again. I knew before the first swing that things would be no different than the last time I tried attacking Piotr, but I couldn’t stop myself. I hammered down with both fists, breath hissing out from between my clenched teeth and spittle flying with every forced exhalation.
Piotr kept walking. “You’re ready. Come.” My arms dropped to my sides, but I couldn’t unclench my fists, impotent rage burning hotter with every step. Helpless, I followed at Anne’s side until we reached the point where the center catwalk that ran directly over the pool touched the outer ring of walkways. We turned onto it and walked out until we reached the middle.
Here there was another plywood sheet attached to the catwalk, about five feet by ten feet, with the long side attached to the catwalk by steel supports. This created a platform five feet wide that paralleled the catwalk for ten feet. Directly across the catwalk from that platform was a metal ladder, crudely welded together, that reached all the way to the surface of the blood pit below.
Piotr and Anne stepped onto the narrow wooden platform. As they did so, my eyes were drawn to the catwalk beyond that was revealed when they stepped aside. An object lay on it, almost at Piotr’s feet.
I froze. A longing rolled through me with an intensity that I would never again experience or be able to fully recall. My feet shuffled as I took a stunned step forward, and then another, and then two more quick steps before I snatched up my prize.
It was dull gray, smooth but not slick, and warm to the touch. The shaft was a cylinder a little over two feet long and two inches thick, and a third of the way down a shorter cylinder stuck out at a right angle. I gripped it, and it flexed in my hand with what felt like a muscular contraction against my palm, for all the world like gripping a snake or an eel in your fist and feeling it twist and squirm.
After the spasm, the dimensions and heft were different. The circumference had slimmed slightly and the handle sticking out of the body moved further down and shortened. It was now an exact copy of my baton in every respect except for the color and unnatural warmth.
I gripped it hard, reveling in the way it fit my hand, and savoring the sense of power and control I had when simply holding it.
“Interesting that you created this very weapon out of scraps after I helped you become reborn in blood,” said Piotr. “All this time you’ve yearned for something that you never knew existed. The human part of you, anyway. The part that belongs to the Devourer knew, of course, already shaping you, forcing your spirit to fit its container, like water in a cup. Your mind is only human, after all, so what chance does it stand against the body of a god? Even now, do you know where your anger comes from? Your lust to bash my skull open and scream your victory into the sky? Was it even your idea to come here in the first place? To get everyone captured, and moved docilely into this place where they could be used to rationalize your cooperation with me?”
I turned and looked at him, at the sly certainty on his face. I couldn’t have known that Piotr needed me to finish summoning his god. And I had to avenge Patrick’s death. I had to come here to end this, didn’t I? Some of my anger faded and I hesitated, thoughts chasing themselves in a circle.
“What matters, Abe, is that we’re here together now. The Avatar of the Devourer and his priest. And now there’s one last thing to do in order to throw wide the gates and let him inhabit the body that is rightfully his.”
He paused and looked me in the eyes, all signs of mirth draining out of his face. “In one minute, I’m going to kill this woman. She will die in agony, torn to pieces as I rip off her limbs, one by one. Unless you kill me first.”
And then a misty tendril whipped out and knocked me off the catwalk.
I barely registered the fall as terror clawed up from my belly and out of my mouth in a shriek. I would not go back into the blood. I couldn’t. The endless nights I spent over the last sixty years reliving that nightmare bloomed in my mind, forcing me to remember suffocating at the bottom of a black lake of thick, choking blood as fire burned away my skin and muscles and bones.
I hit the surface screaming. Every minute of the last sixty years vanished as I burned, the two experiences merging into one. The pool sucked me down into the dark as thick coppery blood forced its way into my nose and down my throat. My lungs spasmed as I choked, flooding them with heavy liquid. I drowned and burned until there was nothing left inside of me but pain and mindless terror as the blood finished what had been interrupted by Henry a lifetime ago.
When the last of me was burned away, the fire went out and the blood went cold. All of my fear vanished, swallowed by a rage so vast that I could scarcely contain it. No thought existed within me, save one, ripping the life from Piotr.
I swam to the surface and found the ladder. Clotting blood fell away from me in thick clumps as I climbed, the stench of the rapidly rotting fluid irrelevant and unnoticed. The baton, which I knew instinctively to be called Hunger, clunked dully against the rungs as I pulled myself upwards. I surged up and over the edge of the catwalk effortlessly, my eyes seeking only Piotr.
His shirt was open, revealing a gray-green lump on his chest thinly veiled in fog, directly over his heart. At his feet was Anne, slumped over, head bowed, bloody wrists still zip-cuffed together in front of her.
His face was exultant and his eyes blazed. He put one hand on the green lump. “It’s time to have your vengeance so that I can have mine. My death by your hand will power the altar and open the way! I give my life so that all others may die.”
With one convulsive yank, he tore the fist sized lump away from his chest, revealing irregularly spaced holes in the raw and decaying flesh beneath. The bottom of the lump was alive with dozens of legs, insectile and spiny, grasping frantically at the air, strings of flesh waving and snapping like pennants from their tips. He threw it to the ground, where it broke apart with a sickening crunch. The legs quivered and went still.
Piotr spread his arms wide, and I charged, raising Hunger over my head. In my hand it shifted again, the three ends becoming pointed and razor sharp. My grip changed from that of a man wielding a club to one holding a stake. Less than ten feet separated us as I blurred forward.
Anne was shouting something at me, but I wasn’t listening. Some tiny part of me woke at the sound of her voice, but it was lost in the haze of my need. My arms rose up over my head, both hands gripping the shaft of the razor-sharp weapon, and Piotr tilted his face upwards, a beatific smile on his lips.
Anne’s voice resolved into words and that tiny part of me that could hear her grew larger. I didn’t bring the point down through Piotr’s face yet. I had no intention of stopping, but I paused for a moment as meaning condensed in my brain. “I’ll die, Abe! You’ll kill me! You’ll kill all of us!”
And then it was time. My arms were moving, powering that deadly tip downward, driven by an all-consuming lust to feel it punch through flesh. I couldn’t hold it back, but I wasn’t completely out of control. Not anymore. As I pulled downward with everything I had, I managed to also pull inward, curving the tip away from Piotr’s face, just grazing his chin as it passed over him and down, into my own heart.
I felt it slide through my flesh until the fist that was closed around the shaft thumped into my chest. My heart fluttered around the spike like a butterfly on a pin, and then stopped. I couldn’t draw a breath. Piotr’s face went from blissful to outraged as he realized what I had done.
I stood, frozen in place, as Anne surged up from her crouch and whipped both of her fists up and around all the way from the ground to the underside of Piotr’s chin. His head snapped back and I could hear the crunch of his ancient neck bones breaking.
Piotr and I fell at the same time. I never felt my legs give out as I fell forward, but the agony when one end of Hunger hit the catwalk and the other one punched out through my back was immediate and overwhelming. I fell sideways, supported by the weapon, then over onto my back, leaving me to stare upwards at the sky. My life flowed up and out of the silver-gray spike, drawn out by the ritual, leaving me cold and uncaring on the floor.
Piotr’s death freed his spirit, which was immediately consumed by the ritual. An explosion that made no sound and moved not a single blade of grass blasted through the minds and hearts of every living thing on Earth.
In that moment, humanity’s stranglehold on reality shattered, and power not felt in thousands of years slammed down from the heavens and pierced the skin of the world. In an epicenter that spanned the entire continent and the surrounding oceans, things that had slumbered for eons, awoke. Places that were once feared again took on their ancient aspects, and modern places became strange and teeming with forces unseen since the dawn of the Age of Reason. Old gods stirred.
Far above me, the clouds blew apart into wispy tatters, revealing a sea of writhing, boiling flesh stretching to the horizon in all directions. It curdled and undulated like a living ocean, and for a moment it seemed as though I were falling into it. The alien landscape loomed closer, allowing me to see that the entire surface was made up of a sea of swollen, multi-legged creatures bursting with worms. They ranged in size from dog to apartment building, and they climbed over each other in heaps, straining towards the ground. If the ritual was successful, they would crash over the Earth in a wave, eating and infecting everything until our world looked just like the one hanging above us.
Anne’s face eclipsed that awful vision as she knelt over me, and I felt a tug in my chest as she pulled Hunger out of my body. There was no longer any pain. The last of my warmth poured out of the hole in my back, and my eyes fluttered shut.
Instead of looking up, I was looking down at my own face. It was covered in black, tarry blood and locked in a rictus of pain and rage. The sight should have frightened me, but it didn’t, because I wasn’t alone.
Patrick was there, although I couldn’t see him, and Shad and Two-Penny and the rest of the squad. They held me close to myself and didn’t let me drift away. Or maybe I held on alone, clinging to my body with only the memories of my friends giving me the strength to do so. Either way, I endured.
Another presence came then, surrounding me. It was foul and alien and hungry and endless, stretching from my body all the way up into the sky. It circled and searched, seeking to possess the body that Piotr had created for it, but that body was useless now without a living spirit inside to use as a bridge to the flesh. The presence strained and fought to remain, but without a human spirit to fuse it to this reality, it could not.
The power of Piotr’s sacrifice was now consumed, so it turned to the only other things it could touch, its own kind in the form of the bags packing the bleachers, and consumed them as well, causing the infected townspeople to drop where they stood as the worms inside of them ceased animating their bodies.
Once they were gone, there was nothing left to power the ritual, and the gateway between our realities collapsed. The Devourer vanished like smoke, unable to exist here without merging with me.
I wanted to rest then and drift away, but Patrick’s face wouldn’t allow me to let go. The vision held me there, suspended in unlife, while Anne worked furiously below me, breathing into my mouth and forcing blood through my heart with the weight of her entire body.
The next thing I remember, I was opening my eyes and the sky was full of nothing but stars.